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Air Force: Reaper drone that crashed into Lake Ontario had failures days before accident

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An MQ-9 Reaper drone from the 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field in Mattydale takes off at Wheeler-Sack Army Air Field at Fort Drum in 2012. An Air Force accident investigation report shows the aircraft that crashed in November into Lake Ontario had repeated maintenance problems with failed GPS navigation units, only days before the accident.
(Photo by Tech. Sgt Ricky Best)

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The MQ-9 Reaper drone that crashed into Lake Ontario after its GPS units failed in November had two similar malfunctions in the days before the accident, according to an Air Force investigation board report.

The 21-page report obtained today by syracuse.com included one paragraph that noted "two separate but similar discrepancies" related to failed Global Positioning Systems that allow unmanned aircraft to navigate through the skies.

One of the GPS units failed in flight on Oct. 29, 2013, forcing the Reaper to return to base after losing a satellite link used by pilots who controlled the plane remotely from the 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field in Mattydale, according to the report.

A second GPS unit failed Nov. 6, 2013 - only six days before the crash -- again forcing the plane to return to its landing base at Fort Drum's Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield.

In both cases, the units were removed from the planes by maintenance personnel and replaced with new ones, the report said. One of those units failed again on Nov. 12 when the plane crashed.

The Air Fore made no reference to the previous failures in its announcement Tuesday that blamed "a series of system malfunctions" for the crash that scattered debris in Lake Ontario near Montario Point on the border of Oswego and Jefferson counties.

Air Force officials, in response to inquiries today, said the November crash was likely an isolated problem, and that the GPS units had never been cited in the past as the reason for a previous crash of a Reaper drone.

But Air Force officials would not say whether the accident prompted inspections of similar units embedded in Reaper drones it has deployed around the world.

Master Sgt. Randy Redman, a spokesman for the Air Force Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, said information about the safety of the GPS units was addressed in a separate Air Force Safety Investigation Report. Those reports are not made public.

"What I can say is that there have been no prior mishaps in the MQ-9 for the
reasons presented in this report," Redman said. "However, the Air Force is constantly evaluating its procedures with regard to flight safety. In general, the Air Force uses the information gathered from investigations to continually evaluate its processes and procedures."

Col. Dana Hessheimer, the Air Force official who served as president of the Accident Investigation Board that looked into the Reaper crash, was not available for comment. Officials said he will not be able to discuss the report until Monday.

Air National Guard officials at the 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field also declined to comment about the report today. The unit was cleared to resume training flights with the Reapers about two weeks after the Lake Ontario crash.

Each MQ-9 Reaper drone is equipped with three embedded GPS/Inertial Navigation Systems for redundancy in case the other units fail. The units made by Honeywell Aerospace help determine the aircraft position, and report to a satellite if the aircraft is speeding up, rolling or turning.

But in the case of the Reaper that crashed into Lake Ontario, the aircraft stopped accepting the valid data from unit #2 after units #1 and #3 stopped functioning, the report said. Air Force officials offered no explanation for that malfunction.

As the systems began to malfunction, the aircraft followed an auto-pilot command to turn right, the report said. But the drone quickly went out of control, inverting and heading into a right-hand spin. The remote pilot back at Hancock Field said, "I can't recover it."

The spinning Reaper descended from 18,800 feet at a rate of 5,000 feet per minute. Despite the loss of control, pilots at Hancock Field had operable video feed as the plane continued to spin to the right and break apart upon crashing into the lake.

Hessheimer said in his report that despite the two previous failures of the embedded GPS units before the crash, he found "no evidence that maintenance personnel, practices or procedures substantially contributed to the mishap."